Jewel Franklin Guy (July 26, 1926 – April 6, 2015), known professionally as James Best, was an American television, film, stage, and voice actor, as well as a writer, director, acting coach, artist, college professor, and musician.

Television audiences, however, perhaps most closely associate Best with his starring role as the bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the action-comedy series The Dukes of Hazzard, which originally aired on CBS between 1979 and 1985.

While stationed in Germany, he transferred from the military police to an army unit of actors, who traveled around Europe performing plays for troops.

[4] Best began his contract career in 1949 at Universal Studios, where he met fellow actors Julie Adams, Piper Laurie, Tony Curtis, Mamie Van Doren and Rock Hudson.

Work in that genre continued to be an important part of his ongoing film career, including roles in The Cimarron Kid (1952); Seven Angry Men (1955), in which he portrays one of the sons of abolitionist John Brown; Last of the Badmen (1957), Cole Younger Gunfighter (1958); Ride Lonesome (1959); The Quick Gun (1964); and Firecreek (1968).

He also starred in the 1959 science fiction cult movie The Killer Shrews, and in its 2012 sequel Return of the Killer Shrews; as army medic Rhidges in the 1958 film adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead; as escaped POW Carter in the James Stewart movie Shenandoah; as Dr. Ben Mizer in the 1966 comedy Three on a Couch; and as the cross-dressing Dewey Barksdale in the 1976 drama Ode to Billy Joe.

He was also cast on an episode of the NBC sitcom The People's Choice and in the crime drama Richard Diamond, Private Detective.

In 1963, he was cast as the courageous Wisconsin game warden Ernie Swift in the episode "Open Season" of another CBS anthology series, GE True, hosted by Jack Webb.

In the story line, Swift's character faces the reprisal of organized crime after he tickets a gangster for illegal fishing.

He appeared on a long list of other television series in the 1950s and 1960s, including Wagon Train (three times), Laramie (three times), The Adventures of Kit Carson, The Rebel, Bonanza, Sheriff of Cochise, Pony Express, Rescue 8, The Texan, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Tombstone Territory, Whispering Smith, Trackdown, The Rifleman, Cheyenne, Stagecoach West, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Overland Trail, Bat Masterson, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Combat!, The Green Hornet ("Deadline for Death"), The Mod Squad, I Spy, The Fugitive, and Flipper.

He made a guest appearance on former costar Anne Francis's series Honey West in the 1965 episode "A Matter of Wife and Death".

Until his death, he remained close to actress Catherine Bach, who played the character of Daisy Duke; and long after the show's cancellation, she was a regular visitor to the website dedicated to Best's painting.

He also developed a reputation as an artist for his paintings of landscapes, scenes from The Dukes of Hazzard in collaboration with Scott Romine, and other subjects.

He also served as artist-in-residence and taught drama at the University of Mississippi (Oxford) for two years prior to his stint on The Dukes of Hazzard.

His students included Lindsay Wagner, Roger Miller, Glen Campbell, Quentin Tarantino, and Regis Philbin.

Prior to his death, Best's former Dukes of Hazzard co-star and longtime friend John Schneider said: "I laughed and learned more from Jimmie in one hour than from anyone else in a whole year."